The Resounding Silences of “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”

When we first meet Shula (Susan Chardy), the quietly unbending protagonist of “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” she is driving home from a fancy-dress party, wearing dark shades, a gleaming metal helmet, and a puffy black jumpsuit—it looks like an inflated trash bag—that engulfs her from the neck down. Some will recognize the look as an homage to Missy Elliott, specifically the music video for her 1997 solo-single début, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”; others may wonder if Shula, with her baggy, birdlike carriage, has already become a guinea fowl. Either way, there is something oddly disquieting about the way Shula comes to us both disguised and armored, as if she were guarding the truth of who she is. Chardy’s watchful, fine-grained performance is crucial to this effect, and it turns out to be the key to the movie. In scene after scene, Shula doesn’t say much, but there is, in practically every frame, an unmistakable anxiety in her composure, as if her mere appearance of calm required a major exertion of will.

It’s late at night, but something Shula sees compels her to stop driving, get out of her car, and investigate. A man lies dead in the road, and it’s immediately apparent that she paused not out of curiosity or concern, but recognition. Sure enough, the body belongs to her fiftysomething uncle Fred (Roy Chisha), a fact that she registers with no sadness or shock, and, indeed, with a certain deadpan detachment. How could Shula, on a dim street in the dead of night, have laid eyes on a supine, nondescript body and realized, in her gut, exactly who it was? The answer is soon revealed: Fred was a serial sexual predator. This turns out to be something of an open secret within Shula’s large, middle-class family, although it is not, apparently, a sufficiently serious one to halt the gauntlet of mourning that lies ahead. “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” was written and directed by Rungano Nyoni, a Zambian-born British filmmaker, whose family moved to Wales when she was a child. Her second feature, it is taut, absorbing, and, at ninety-nine minutes, ruthlessly concise. But what it bears witness to, over several days and nights of funeral rites, is a staggering endurance test, in which Shula is tasked with honoring the dishonorable.

Shula grew up here, in Zambia, but she has only recently returned, after some time away. Nyoni’s film is thus the story of an unusually pained homecoming, of terrible memories confronted. Shula was abused by Fred as a child; so was her cousin Nsansa (a raucous Elizabeth Chisela), who is as irrepressible and exuberant as Shula is cautious and stern. When Nsansa drunkenly recounts the time Fred took her to a lodge years earlier, she does so with irreverent cackles, mocking his genitalia and implying that he was barely capable of violating her; only later, after sobering up, does she confess the terrible, more banal reality of what occurred. A younger cousin, Bupe (Esther Singini), tells her own long-buried story of abuse in a heartbreaking cell-phone video, only part of which we see and hear; later, in a startling formal elision, Bupe’s words overlap and merge with Shula’s own. The point is not simply that the cousins share a painful experience but that individual testimony has a collective power. One woman, in speaking out, can speak for others as well.

Had “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” been conceived purely as a drama of unearthed memories, unhealed trauma, and thwarted accountability, it would cut to the bone. But Nyoni goes further still. It’s no coincidence that Shula shares her given name with the young protagonist of the director’s powerful first feature, “I Am Not a Witch” (2017). The Shula in that movie is an adolescent girl who is accused of witchcraft and exiled to a remote “witch camp,” where she and other imprisoned women are mistreated, exploited, and put on display for tourists, like zoo creatures or carnival freaks. Both films were shot by the superb cinematographer David Gallego, and in both he invests shots of gathered crowds with a peculiarly transfixing tension. In “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” the precious, anguished intimacies that Shula exchanges with her cousins are relentlessly pressurized by the social obligations and anxieties of the funeral; they’re choked off almost before they can begin to take meaningful root. Amid the busy work of grief, the young women have no real time to grieve for themselves.

Nyoni films the preparations and rituals with an observational rigor that sharpens our own concentration. It’s an astonishing spectacle to behold. Relatives descend en masse on Shula’s family home, which is now temporarily a “funeral house”; furniture is cleared away, and mattresses are brought in for the women, who sleep indoors, while the men set up camp outside. Such gender segregation is a constant; it falls to the women of the house to make the arrangements, buy food, and cook meals. Amid power outages (a nod to Zambia’s energy crisis) and unexpected floods, an entire machinery of mourning kicks into gear, and Shula and her cousins are among its busiest cogs. In one casually infuriating sequence, Shula searches desperately for Bupe, gravely concerned about her well-being, only to be repeatedly distracted by older male relatives who demand that she serve them food. Further affirming the general uselessness of the male sex is Shula’s father (Henry B. J. Phiri), who never misses an opportunity to hit his daughter up for money and turns a largely deaf ear to any word of Fred’s trespasses.

The older women in Shula’s family, despite superficial gestures of support and compassion, do not prove much better. Shula is all but bullied into submission by her aunts, who scold her for having bathed—something strictly forbidden until the mourning period is over—and demand to know why she remains dry-eyed in the wake of her uncle’s death. In these moments, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” achieves a startling panorama of cross-generational alienation, in which Fred’s abuses are shown to have destroyed any meaningful connection between mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces. Remarkably, Nyoni and Gallego convey this rupture almost entirely through compositional emphasis. In the early mourning scenes, they use camera placement to strategically conceal the older women’s faces and identities, reducing them to an undifferentiated blur of weeping and wailing. Juxtaposed with so much performative misery, Shula’s unwavering serenity takes on a steely moral clarity, throwing the absurdity of the whole charade into stark relief. Even when Shula’s figure is partially obscured, or filmed from behind, we can generally tell from the set of her shoulders—Chardy’s clenched body language is grimly eloquent—precisely what she is thinking and feeling.

One of the film’s most tragic figures is Fred’s meek and traumatized young widow (Norah Mwansa), who is treated abominably by Shula’s aunts. They accuse her of driving Fred to his death through irresponsibility and neglect, and they attempt to weaponize this accusation financially, denying her and her relatives any claim to Fred’s estate. In reality, the circumstances of Fred’s death seem neither ambiguous nor suspicious. It’s implied that he expired at a brothel, likely mid-coitus, not far from the road where his body was found. Nyoni could have played “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” as a murder mystery, a funeral-parlor whodunit; certainly there is no shortage of suspects or motives where the loathsome Fred is concerned. But there are really only two mysteries at play here: how will Shula and her cousins, amid so much pretense, bring the truth to light? And what does that have to do with the film’s eccentric, unforgettable title?

The two answers are deeply and imaginatively intertwined, and the peculiar significance of the guinea fowl can be found, like the wounds and scars of abuse themselves, deep in the mists of memory. The eerily thrilling dénouement must be seen and heard to be believed. Suffice to say that this Shula is most certainly not a witch, but by the end there is no denying that she—and Nyoni—have a profound capacity for magic. ♦